


An Open Door

by Workparty



Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Alternate Canon, First Aid, Gen, Lack of Communication, Secret Identity, not quite identity reveal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-20
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-16 09:13:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29573700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Workparty/pseuds/Workparty
Summary: The Fentons have an understanding with Danny Phantom; they won't hunt him, and he tries to stay away from them. Danny hasn't exactly tested the limits before, but Maddie finding Phantom injured and bleeding on her son's bed probably wasn't what they had in mind.So why doesn't she want to talk about it?
Relationships: Danny Fenton & Maddie Fenton
Comments: 7
Kudos: 115





	An Open Door

Oh!

It was 12:02.

Happy birthday to me.

I hadn't planned to spend my first-ever minutes as an adult performing first aid on myself, but I also hadn't planned to spend my last hours as a teenager fighting Vortex. I _could_ have avoided it if I'd paid more attention, but between all the other ghosts that had been attacking lately, I wasn't exactly paying attention to the weather. At least until the spring heat-wave entered its second week.

The weather was still trying to fix itself. Vortex only really affected Amity Park and the temperature started to take a nose-dive as soon as the thermos was capped, the sky clouding over until you couldn't see the stars. It'd started raining by the time I was halfway home, so I was basically soaked by the time I collapsed onto my bed.

Then I had to fix myself. Some of the gashes were pretty deep, too. Having been momentarily distracted from how awful self-administered first aid is, I got back to peeling the HAZMAT suit away from my shoulders. Clothing in ghost form is kind of "sticky" in a way that's hard to describe, but I definitely felt every single cut and scrape as the material pulled away.

Especially _th_ _at_ cut.

I think it was a stop sign that hit me. Right on the side of the upper arm. Amazing what hurricane force winds and inattention could do.

It had leaked ectoplasm for the first few minutes. Now, the skin was already trying to pull itself together, and maybe if I had a bit more energy it would have already closed up. But I was drained. Literally, I had lost a lot of ectoplasm. Probably best not to think about it too much, and be thankful it had come toward the end of the fight when catching Vortex was basically guaranteed. I already kind of just... Wanted to go to sleep.

But I had to stay awake long enough to take care of this properly. Even though it'd stopped bleeding as a ghost, it was a pretty good cut, and I didn't want to know what that'd do as a human.

The first butterfly bandage got slippery with ectoplasm and sweat and fell right off. I was kind of struggling to see that far around my own arm, with the awkward angle, but I tried to wipe the fluids away with one of those alcohol towelette things.

The second butterfly bandage only stayed half on, and the other half slipped into the wound. And yeah, that was really awful to pull off-slash-out. The room went kinda fuzzy and I think I swore.

The third butterfly bandage never left its wrapper. I was fumbling trying to open it with slippery fingers when there was a knock on the door.

"Danny? Are you OK in there?" And y'know if I'd been human I'd be really interested to know what hearing my mom just then would have done to my heart rate.

"Everything's fine!" I kind of half-shouted, probably a little too quickly. And maybe slurring a little too much.

So of course she opened the door. "Are you sure? I thought I heard—" Her face peeked into the room and did a bit of a 180 when she saw me. Like, ghost-me. "Oh. Phantom."

I decided to go with what the adrenaline wanted me to do.

I flew away. Or at least I tried, because sitting in ghost form in front of a ghost hunter while half-undressed seemed like a bad idea, but it turned out flying was an even worse idea. I fell back on the bed as soon as I'd gotten clear of it, so I'd accomplished nothing except now I was partly slumped over the side above the floor and I was in more pain.

"You shouldn't run. That injury on your shoulder looks bad." Thanks, Dr. Fenton.

"'s not that bad," I lied, "Had worse, just gonna..." and I was too distracted by trying to sit upright again to come up with a plausible end for that sentence.

"Stay there." There was no room for arguing. She didn't stick around to hear it anyway, I heard her clicky footsteps walking away from the door. Probably getting ghost hunting equipment. There'd been an unofficial truce for a couple of years now, but that was before she found me in "her son's" room.

And I was pretty sure a bit of ectoplasm had started leaking out of the cut again.

So this was how it ended, huh?

I'd had a good run. Things had been looking up. I'd almost made it all the way through highschool. With decent enough grades to get into Northwest University, even. All I had to do was make it through the next four months. Prom, graduation, freedom, and then it didn't matter who or what I was or wasn't.

Actually, what I really needed to do was make it through the next four minutes. I heard those clacking footsteps coming back up the stairs.

The footsteps entered the room and weirdly I didn't get shot at right away. The door closed quietly and she was walking toward the bed. It was strange enough that I had to put together enough energy to look up and make sure it was actually mom.

It was, but she wasn't carrying any weapons. Instead, she was balancing a first aid kit (the good one from the basement), a glass of water, and what looked suspiciously like a lab sample container. I was pretty confused when she walked over to the side of the bed my head was hanging off and just set everything down on the bedside table.

I was looking up at her upside down. I probably looked terrified, but she didn't look even a little angry or like, vengeful or anything. Mostly she just looked... Determined?

"Let's get you positioned properly."

She reached an arm under my upper back (I felt her shiver at the contact, I think just because of the temperature) and kind of lift-pulled me upright, propped up on pillows. Then, she pulled my legs up onto the bed, balling up the covers and shoving them under my feet so they were elevated.

Which is all very first aidy and when she seemed satisfied I wasn't going to die right then and there, she crouched down on one knee so she was level with the injury. "I'm going to have to clean this out before I put sutures in, is that ok Phantom?"

I didn't say anything. Partly because I wasn't sure I'd heard her right, and partly because at the time I was just surprised to still be alive.

But she took that as permission, anyway. She pulled the rest of the sleeve off my arm (and, ouch, there was like a million little scrapes that had barely started to heal) and poured half the water into the wound. It hurt a lot, frankly, but I did a pretty good job of hiding it. Barely shouted, even.

"Sorry, sorry..." she muttered, digging around in the first aid kit. "Here." When I opened my eyes again, she was holding out a pair of Advil tablets in the middle of her black glove. Again I really didn't know what the playbook was here, but it seemed like real Advil. I knocked them back with the rest of the water.

Mom cracked the seal on the sample container, and thunder rumbled overhead like we were in some kind of 1950s horror B-movie. It smelled like purified ectoplasm. It's kind of a sweet-but-not-in-a-good-way, almost electric smell. She held it out to me like it was supposed to be obvious what she wanted me to do with it.

"You should drink that," she explained patiently. "It looks like you've lost a lot of fluid."

Two things. This was going way beyond any truce we might have had, which had consisted of them not actively firing at me and toning down all the anti-Phantom stuff around the dinner table, but definitely hadn't included emergency first aid. Not that I'd been aware of anyway. Secondly, I'd never drunk ectoplasm before, because that's gross.

But mostly it was that first thing that was bugging me. I was still a ghost. Why was she doing this? I tried to articulate that into a question, but I was still slurring a lot. "Maddie, I—"

And before I could get out more than three syllables she gave me one of those looks, straight in the eyes, the kind that says that you should stop talking now. "I just want to get you patched up. We don't have to talk about it, if you don't want to."

I was in her son's room. Danny Phantom. Not in "my" room, because it was Danny Fenton's. Didn't she want to talk about it?

...did I?

What would I even say?

There was a lot I _could_ say. I mean, I'd thought about it, especially at first. Back when they still hunted me and I thought I might need to fess up to avoid... Yeah. But all the overthinking in the world hadn't prepared me for whatever this was.

There was another flash of lightning. I counted out of habit; one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand. The thunder rolled and rumbled over the house, starting soft and growing louder as it went, until it died as abruptly as the flash. I still hadn't said anything.

Mom didn't wait for me. She was back to grabbing stuff out of the first aid kit and drew a pair of latex gloves over her other latex gloves. It would have been funny at almost any other moment. I watched what she was doing until she started removing a sterile needle and thread from a small plastic bag, and then I did my best to look almost anywhere else.

Even though the Advil had started to kick in, it stung like hell.

The room was dark aside from the orange light washing in through the rain-covered window. It cast soft, indistinct shadows. The thread pulled tight, too tight, stinging as she pulled it around itself into a knot. And then she started again with the next stitch. The house was silent, leaving just the soft pitter-patter of droplets on the window. There was another flash that briefly brought the shadows into sharp relief. One one thousand, two one thousand, and a crash of thunder. I guess it was getting closer now. The needle slipped back above the skin and the thread was pulled tight. Another knot. And then another stitch.

I braved a look at my mom's face. There was no obvious emotion, like she was fully concentrating on the arm, but I guess me looking over caught her eye. She glanced at me for a moment before going back to stitching. "You really should drink that before it gets warm."

I'd managed to forget I was holding the ectoplasm. I brought it up to my lips, took a sip, and nearly gagged at the smell. It was like somebody had left a water bottle in the sun too long, although the taste wasn't as bad. I would have just plugged my nose if I had a spare hand, but, y'know. The needle pulled up, the thread was knotted, and the needle dove back down again. The texture of pure ectoplasm was actually the strangest part; it was somewhere between a gas station slushie and that aloe vera juice you can get in the Asian foods aisle at the grocery store.

But I thought I felt a little bit better, so I guess it worked.

I thought it might not be so bad if I just got it over with, so I chugged back the whole container as quickly as I could, ignoring the smell as much as possible, ignoring the needle pulling back up through my skin, and gasping for air when I reached the end. A fork of lighting lit the room up like the morning sun and thunder boomed over the house, rattling the windows, rattling the furniture. It caught me off guard, on top of everything else. If I'd had more energy, and if my mom wasn't holding my arm, I probably would have jumped a little.

"I think four sutures will do it." I looked over at her. She was inspecting her handiwork. "Try to not go intangible until this is healed, it's just normal thread." Mom set down something heavy and metal on the table and I decided I could stomach a look at the cut; neat little rows of thread had pulled it tightly closed. It was barely glowing. With any luck, it would be healed by morning. When I looked back at her, she was already digging through the first aid kit again, pulling out a sealed gauze pad and a length of bandage.

She carefully applied the gauze, wordlessly telling me to hold it in place while she unrolled the bandage. She cut a length off the roll and wrapped it around the arm, once, twice, three times, and clipped it in place. It held tight. It didn't hurt so much anymore.

Another flash of lightning forked in front of the window as she stood up. One one thousand, two on thousand, three one thousand. A distant rumble that quickly grew quiet.

"You'll need to rest. We should change the sheets so you aren't sleeping in ectoplasm all night."

Ok, so apparently now I was staying here all night. No word on where "Danny" would be sleeping.

...Ok.

I tried to sit up, which was very not ok. Kinda made the room spin a little.

"Here, let me help you into a chair."

She had moved to the other side of the bed and stooped low to pick me up. I tried to help by floating a little, but that was still hard to do, and she definitely did the bulk of the heavy lifting. I weigh less as a ghost but it's fun to be a real adult and have a mom who can still pick you up like it's no big deal, definitely not embarrassing at all.

On her way out the door, she turned around to check if I was still where she'd left me. As if I could run off like this.

And then she left, leaving the door wide open. I heard her searching through the closest in the hallway.

That was when my brain started working properly again.

I still hadn't said anything. I'd thought about this a thousand ways, dreamed about it a thousand more. I'd talked about some of the ways I could do it with Sam and Tucker. They were helpful, but they'd never had to hide anything like this from their parents. They were normal. There was only so much they could say, only so much they could relate. So if they didn't understand, being there from the start, how could my parents? After this many years?

And I was still overthinking all of this when mom re-entered the room, holding a tall pile of bedding. The pain had been a nice distraction, actually. None of this made sense unless she... But she couldn't. She would have said something. I should have said something. Why wasn't I saying anything? Mom was stripping the filthy, ectoplasm-stained sheets off the bed and making it again with the pristine white guest linen. The fitted sheet was loose and wrinkled. Why wasn't she saying anything? She placed a pair of pillows at the head of the bed and one at the foot, and then approached me on the chair.

I must have been looking at her funny. She must have known, known what I was thinking about. She just shook her head and scooped me up in two arms like a 5'9" sack of flour. Again, not embarrassing.

She laid me down in bed, making sure my feet were elevated on the bottom pillow, and then threw a top sheet and duvet over me. She folded it over so it didn't cover my face or neck, like I was still 4 years old and still her son. But... I was tired and it was comfortable. And neither of us said a word.

The way she looked at me lying there was strange. Her expression was... Sad, but not sad, and hopeful, and some other things I couldn't figure out. And then she started to turn to leave the room, and I kind of panicked.

My mouth started talking without my brain's permission. "I should thank you."

"You can thank me later if the stitches hold." She patted the bed near my non-injured arm like that was some kind of note to close on, instead of a weird thing to do at the end of a lot of weird things she'd done.

The door closed with a click behind her.

There was a distant flash outside. One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand, five one thousand...

* * *

I walked down the stairs the next morning to the smell of smoke and the sound of something sizzling, both growing as I got closer to the kitchen. Mom was at the stove and the counter looked like a warzone where the two sides used flour-based weapons. I hovered in the doorway until she saw me.

Her face brightened. "Good morning Danny! Today's the big day, isn't it?"

Totally ordinary birthday morning, yep. "I guess it is, huh?"

"18 already. How time flies!" She chuckled and I didn't know how. Where did she think I slept last night?

"Yeah."

"I'm making pancakes!"

"Oh?"

Her eyes crinkled at the corners a bit and her voice dropped to conspiratorial tones. "With _chocolate chips_. You only turn 18 once!"

That kind of broke me. Were we really about to ignore... And _pancakes?_ It was so domestic, almost too ordinary after everything, but not the kind of thing you did if you were... Upset.

I felt... A lot of things just then. But I think I was genuinely smiling. She turned back to the stove, and I took a seat at the table. It was already set at my usual chair; plate, knife, fork, an empty glass. Maple syrup on the side. On the table sat a carton of orange juice and a sealed lab sample container filled to the top with roiling ectoplasm.

When I saw it I stopped scooting the chair forward. Abruptly. Like if I got closer it would, I don't know what. It just didn't belong at a pancake breakfast.

...This wasn't really an ordinary breakfast, though, was it? This was an open door.

Mom was still busy at the stove, back to me, trying very hard to scrape something off the pan with a metal spatula.

I pulled the chair in and, ignoring the ectoplasm, filled my glass with orange juice.

"Here we go—" Mom turned back to the table, holding a stack of pancakes on the spatula. When she saw the full glass and the still-sealed sample container her face fell for a moment. I did my best not to show any obvious signs of emotion.

I don't know why. But I wasn't going to acknowledge it. In a way, maybe she'd been asking me, but...

But she recovered quickly. She put the pancakes on the plate and kissed me in the hair. "Happy birthday, sweetie," she whispered, then pulled away.

"Hey, mom?"

I looked up at her, and she looked back down at me. Sad, and not sad, and hopeful, and some other things too.

"Thank you."

She smiled. "Any time."

**Author's Note:**

> "Just because you love your family doesn't mean you talk about everything." I've been thinking about reveal stories a lot lately (crazy, right?) and just kept looping back on that idea. And then this happened.
> 
> I wrote the draft very, very late at night, and did my best to wrangle it into something readable the following day. It's rough, it's weird, and maybe just a little OOC, but I think I like it anyway.


End file.
